Entertainment Weekly's Scores

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For 7,797 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 68% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 30% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 13th
Lowest review score: 0 Wide Awake
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,958 out of 7797
  2. Mixed: 2,079 out of 7797
  3. Negative: 760 out of 7797
7797 movie reviews
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  1. Total Recall
    Starts out as mind-bending futuristic satire and then turns relentless -- it becomes a violent, postpunk version of an Indiana Jones cliff-hanger.
  2. Back to the Future Part III
    Back to the Future Part III has that same sort of studio back-lot clunkiness. Only this time it's the audience that gets conked — by the sheer desperation of the whole enterprise.
  3. Fire Birds
    A third-rate knockoff of Top Gun and Blue Thunder.
  4. Cadillac Man
    Cadillac Man, like the recent I Love You to Death, starts out as comedy on a human scale and turns into canned farce. For an actor like Robin Williams, that’s the movie equivalent of being muzzled.
  5. Bird on a Wire
    Bird on a Wire is far from inept-every one of those car chases is masterfully staged. Still, for most of two hours you’re pummeled with formula; it would be hard to name another movie at once so proficient and so dull. When a director as talented as Badham reaches this state of empty craftsmanship, who can say whether he’s working out of boredom or cynicism? At this point, there may be very little difference.
  6. Class of 1999
    A trashy teen derivative of The Road Warrior, Blade Runner, RoboCop, and every other retro-future fantasy that director Mark L. Lester could cram into the compactor.
  7. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
    Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! is seamlessly crafted yet too self-conscious to be much fun.
  8. Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Its title aside, this slow, clunky omnibus film feels more like a TV show than a movie. It’s not very scary, and there isn’t much contrast among the episodes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Last Exit to Brooklyn
    Aficionados of fine acting will find Last Exit to Brooklyn worth renting for the complex performances of Lang and Leigh. But, with its vague and unresolved story and themes, the movie remains a blur.
  10. Wild Orchid
    In the ludicrous soft-core fantasia Wild Orchid, Mickey Rourke is so tan he looks as though he’d spent a week with his head in a microwave.
  11. Q & A
    Q&A is a major film by one of our finest mainstream directors. As both a portrait of modern-day corruption and an act of sheer storytelling bravura, it is not to be missed.
  12. Spaced Invaders
    Set on Halloween, this intentionally cheesy sci-fi parody doesn’t offer much variety among its human characters, but its animatronic aliens — who look like sourpuss versions of Spielberg’s E.T. — are amusingly obnoxious.
  13. Miami Blues
    What really sinks the movie, though, is Alec Baldwin’s strenuously awful performance.
  14. Crazy People
    The movie wants you to giggle and say, ”Yup, we sure are saps, aren’t we?”
  15. The Gods Must Be Crazy II
    It’s essential to recognize Uys’ patronization of the Bushmen for what it is: a beguiling form of racism.
  16. I Love You to Death
    I Love You to Death is strenuously unclever.
  17. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover
    The Cook, The Thief is so full of loathing it just about gags on its own bile.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ernest Goes to Jail
    The script tries to work up sympathy for a character who’s not much more than the bastard trailer-park spawn of Jerry Lewis. Sadly, this is everything you ever thought an Ernest movie would be.
  19. The First Power
    Yet another low-grade spectacular about an evil force that leaps from body to body.
  20. Cry-Baby
    There are some funny moments, but this may be the first time the director’s scabrous, anarchic wit seems vaguely depressed.
  21. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    When a kids’ flick has nothing to offer but cute special effects, it’s easy to think the filmmakers are patting themselves on the backs for their technical ingenuity. That’s not comic fantasy — that’s marketing.
  22. Pretty Woman
    Starts out as a neo-Pygmalion comedy, but the film is slow, earnest, and rhythmless.
  23. The Fourth War
    The Fourth War is an old-soldiers-never-die movie — an ironic elegy — and though much of the story is contrived and second-rate, Scheider gives a richly felt performance.
  24. A Shock to the System
    The movie is juicy fun, a high comedy about the personality of power.
  25. Blue Steel
    Blue Steel lacks sustained storytelling craftsmanship, and it never approaches the saturnine intensity of the film it sometimes recalls, Michael Mann’s Manhunter (the greatest thriller of the past decade). But it makes you eager to see what Bigelow could do with a good script.
  26. Lord of the Flies
    As a novel, Lord of the Flies never was much more than a Brat Pack Heart of Darkness. It’s doubtful a screen version could be any better than this one.
  27. Blind Fury
    The Zatoichi films are amusing comic-strip spectaculars — the blood spurts like something out of a Hawaiian Punch commercial. The action in Blind Fury, on the other hand, is resolutely earthbound and heavy-duty. The fact that Hauer kicks, slashes, and punches without the benefit of sight just makes you acutely aware of how ludicrous this stuff always is.
  28. House Party
    The movie is slick and cartoonish but also extremely clever, and its unabashed conventionality is exactly what’s fun about it.
  29. Joe Versus the Volcano
    There’s something weirdly innocent about Shanley’s ineptitude: He seems to be inventing the oldest cliches for the very first time. The movie doesn’t really hit bottom, though, until he has Ryan deliver an ickily earnest monologue about how her character is ”soul-sick.” I think she means, ”Pass the Pepto-Bismol.
  30. Bad Influence
    The movie is consistently entertaining; it sucks you in. James Spader is a little too recessive, yet he lends the action a core of wormy anxiety.
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